I intended to go to bed ages ago, but I'm a complete failure at that, as you all know -- if you didn't know that, your reading comprehension on this blog is seriously flawed. Anyway, I was v. v. productive today, which was kind of painful. I got up around 9:30 (which will likely happen again tomorrow), took care of a bit of email, and unpacked all my stuff (and as usual, I way overpacked for what's really three days and four nights away -- I brought fifteen books - research books, in my defense; five pairs of shoes, four sweatshirts, five pants/leggings, and approximately eight tops). Then, I hole punched the entire manuscript that I printed out yesterday, put it in its pretty binder to cover up the fact that it's a seeping, oozing mass of dreck, and walked out in search of breakfast/brunch/lunch.
I ended up at some cafe that seems very popular with the hippies/surfers that populate Santa Cruz -- it's so odd to see people who aren't hipsters or Marina douchebags, and I couldn't help but stare at them. I had a seafood omelette that disappointed me because the shrimp didn't taste super fresh and I don't really like omelettes (why do I always forget this?), and some hash browns that I didn't finish because they weren't that great either -- but the coffee was good, and I sat in the sun for a couple of hours and read the first half of my manuscript. Then I walked down to the beach and relocated to another cafe, where I enjoyed an Italian soda at another sun-drenched table while finishing the reread of the manuscript.
And I must admit that it's not total garbage -- I'm my own worst critic (so far, at least; I'm sure someone will savage my book at some point), so I'm probably not being fair. But it's good that I had to walk home, since the sunshine and fresh air dulled the sharpest edge of my incipient panic attack. When I got here, I took a nap, then wrote out everything I want to change, then went through chapter-by-chapter and put a post-it at the front of each chapter saying what needs to be fixed.
Granted, a lot of these fixes are a matter of adding/removing a couple of lines, not wholesale rewrites, thank goodness. And after this experience, I will never again try to salvage a manuscript -- rewriting the whole thing from scratch might have been easier, since the biggest problem in the first ten chapters is that I tried to save some stuff, and now Malcolm and Amelia's motivations (Malcolm's in particular) are a total mess because he's basically got two wildly different goals shoved into the same character. Damn.
I did take a break to go to Chipotle, which was oh-so-romantic, since I'm spending Valentine's Day by myself, tearing my hear out and gnashing my teeth and cursing my fate. Then I came home and worked some more, and then I put the manuscript aside to answer a bit of email, thinking I could take care of the most pressing things on my to-do list and make it to bed by 11pm. And instead, it's almost 2am, but I feel better about my myriad extracurriculars now that I've sent out emails about all of them. Remind me to never again claim that I'm going to publish four books in a year -- and if I do claim that, don't let me chair a national romance convention committee and be a VP for a local romance chapter. And really, someone should stop me from pitching workshops to all the conferences I'm going to pitch workshops to -- but you know I'm not actually going to cut back. It's a disease, I tell ya.
Now, though, I must sleep -- I want to make it through the main fixes in the first half of the book tomorrow, and that means I need to get up sometime before noon, which means I should sleep. Goodnight!
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